I will not be spoiling this movie like I did its predecessor. For one, it just came out and more importantly I respect the deftly plotted and better written film that it is.

I said in my Rise review that the film wasn’t nearly well-written enough to support moral ambiguity. Well that’s changed here. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a tale of how limited resources, mistrust, and bad leadership between groups of survivors leads to ruinous war. It’s kind of like what Season 3 of The Walking Dead was going for but a lot better.

SPOILER WARNING: The following review/discussion contains spoilers for the whole movie since it’s a couple of years old and I felt like telling the whole story was the best way to talk about what didn’t work. But yeah. Short version: I didn’t think it was a very good movie.

The tagline is ridiculous. The smart apes have nothing to do with evolution. They’re made smart by drugs, but I guess the marketers couldn’t resist the rhyme.

A couple years back Rise of the Planet of the Apes came out as a reboot of the titular franchise. I wasn’t interested at the time although I heard a lot of good things about it from a plethora of people. Critics liked it and so did average filmgoers. Now the sequel is coming out and I thought the previews for that looked kinda cool so it was about time for me to see this good film I missed.

But it’s not a good movie. Why did everyone say it was? Why did you lie to me, General Consensus?

So I played Watch Dogs this week. Fun game. Doesn’t live up to the hype of the original E3 demo, but nothing could. Still, as far as open world games go I like it better than average and it does feel somewhat unique.

There were a host of little things that bothered me about my experience, however. And since nitpicking is so much more fun than vaguely praising something, I’ll be doing a bit of that to start.

The story is probably the main thing that doesn’t quite work. That’s because, as with so many games, the gameplay and the story are at odds. Some high-minded people refer to this as ludonarrative dissonance. Not me, of course. I’m never pretentious.

I just finished the latest Legend of Zelda game: A Link Between Worlds. When I first heard that there was going to be a sequel to 1992’s A Link to the Past which is widely regarded as one of the very best Zelda games, my inner cynic took note. I thought it was a really desperate move by Nintendo. They’ve been struggling to get the “hardcore gamer” audience back after neglecting and maybe even alienating them for basically the entire lifecycle of the Wii. What better way than to make a sequel to a 21 year old game, right?

I hadn’t bought a Nintendo game in many years. After hearing all the accolades for this game, A Link Between Worlds became my first purchase for the 3DS.

And it is good. It’s really good. I mean, it’s a Zelda game and most of them are pretty great.

A new year is upon us and that means it’s time to hand out meaningless accolades to various media properties because making lists is fun!

I am quite intentionally calling these “favorite” lists rather than “best of” lists because there’s a lot of games, movies, and music I didn’t experience in 2013 which no doubt deserve attention and praise, but I can’t consume everything in a year. With that in mind, I am limiting my lists to a Top 3 with possible honorable and dishonorable mentions.

2013 was a bad year for sci-fi. There were a lot of sci-fi films with potential that just didn’t pay off. I saw a few of them in the theater and none were really satisfying.

I went to see Oblivion because a group of friends was going and I like my friends more than I dislike Tom Cruise. And while I admire Oblivion’s restraint in the action and pacing departments, the script was riddled with the screenwriting equivalent of explosions: dumb, pointless plot twists. None of it made any sense but they were hoping the audience wouldn’t notice in the moment.

I wish this had been an Elder Scrolls movie instead. Also, the actress on the left looks like Chell from Portal. A Poral movie would have also been preferable.

Most of the group thought it was okay. A few thought it was boring and a few liked it outright. But I’m guessing that all of them have virtually forgotten about it now. I haven’t because I found it so offensively vapid and boring that it kind of stuck with me. That’s what you call ironic.

I had high hopes for the sequel to the 2009 semi-reboot of Star Trek. I cordially like the 2009 movie even though there’s not a lot going on under the surface, it still did a lot of things right.

I cannot say the same for Star Trek Into Darkness. I hated this one. I don’t mean to be a hater, but I can’t help it. Instead of a proper story (Star Trek-appropriate or otherwise) we got a set of action scenes, references to older, better Star Trek stuff, and Benedict Cumberbatch playing a character named Khan who wasn’t anything like Khan.

Borrowed pathos – this movie tries to invoke the feelings stirred by the best moments from old Star Trek and fails miserably

Into Darkness is bad on almost all non-technical levels. I have so many problems with this film that it’s not even worth going into. The screenwriters thought they were being clever by ripping off Star Trek II – the real Star Trek II. Sometimes reusing ideas works but here it just comes off as bad imitation. And it’s imitation without purpose or thought.

If I judge the movie on its own merits, it’s not very good. It’s shallow and empty and doesn’t do as much with the characters as Star Trek 2009 did. But if I judge it as part of the greater Star Trek canon (and the writers seem to be begging me to do this with their constant references and callbacks) then it’s a horrible, derivative mess. I left the theater offended and annoyed.

I had a passing interest in Elysium, the sophomore effort from District 9 director Neill Blomkamp, but I lost the interest as soon as I saw the trailer. Reviews and word-of-mouth affirmed my lack of interest. Detractors cite its heavy-handed political commentary as a negative. I have no problem – theoretically – with movies that borrow current political issues for themes, but I have rarely seen it done well. Subtly is the name of the game. In Elysium it was not subtle unless I was very deceived by the trailer and other commentators.

My biggest sci-fi hope for the year was Gravity. I already talked about that in another post. If anything, my feelings about the movie have further cooled since I’ve seen it. I really don’t care if I ever see it again. It had no story. I didn’t really even have ideas. It also failed to connect with me emotionally. It was just a ride. If I want that sort of experience, I’ll go play a video game where I have some level of input into what’s happening.

There’s quite a few smaller sci-fi films I didn’t see but I indent to. I fully admit it’s possible there was a really good sci-fi this year that slipped under the radar. But the big names disappointed.

Fortunately, 2014 will bring us some more sci-fi movies with potential. Hopefully more of these will turn out well.

Christopher Nolan’s longtime director of photography, Wally Pfister, is taking the reigns of his first movie. Transcendence starring Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall is ostensibly about the technological singularity – a theoretical event where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. This has been a plot point in a lot of fiction before, but Transcendence will attempt to guess what this might look like in the not-too-distant future of our modern world. Check out the trailer below.

Again, I don’t want to be a naysayer, but I am highly skeptical of the film industry’s ability to handle technology – and particularly artificial intelligence – in an interesting or remotely realistic way. It doesn’t happen very much.

I have two major problems with this trailer. One: the movie purports to be about the singularity but the plot actually seems to be centered around a character uploading his consciousness into a computer. That’s really not an exploration of superintelligent AI then, is it?

My bigger problem is that the whole thing seems to devolve into stupid action tropes by the end. There are lots of other ways an advanced AI would change the world besides causing lots of violence. We’ve seen computers go rogue before. The computer being evil twist has been done in countless other films. I was really hoping for something new and different.

I don’t have a problem with action movies – I really don’t. I have a problem with action films passing themselves off as something more intelligent when there’s really nothing to them. Why do so many sci-fis also have to be action movies? Why can’t they just be about ideas and characters and choices? Why can’t they be subtle and take their time anymore?

I really hope the trailer is just showing all the action to get people into the theater and that the movie itself is actually a lot more thoughtful than it appears here.

But I doubt it.

A bit more promising is the new X-men film: Days of Future Past. I’m cheating a little with this one. It’s probably more of a superhero film than a sci-fi, but since the plot revolves around time travel I’m going to say it’s close enough.

I really like this trailer a lot. Why? Because it’s about characters rather than action. I can sort of sense where the movie might be going, but I haven’t had the plot explained to me with clunky, pieced-together exposition. It makes me way more excited to see this movie than if it had just been a bunch of mutants fighting each other.

I always say X-men has the best central conflict of the big name superhero franchises. It’s great because our villain (Magneto) is right about human nature but his methods are morally wrong whereas our hero (Professor Xavier) is a bit overly optimistic – maybe a little naive – about humanity but his methods are morally admirable.

It’s easy to see how Xavier might have become jaded and hopeless after being betrayed by Magneto and crippled inX-men: First Class. It seems like it’s up to Patrick Stewart’s Professor X to redeem James McAvoy’s Professor X and restore sanity to the future. Or something like that.

The X-men film timeline is a bit of a mess right now. I’m not sure if they’re intending to fix that with a time travel story, but I like the idea of getting all these great actors in one movie.

And finally we have a sci-fi film from Christopher Nolan called Interstellar. Inception was arguably a sci-fi movie, but functionally it was more of a dressed-up heist film than anything else. This time around it looks like we’re going full science fiction – in space!

Interstellar is about… we’re not really sure yet. It’s a Christopher Nolan film and it’s a year away so details are scant. The teaser trailer provides very little information; in fact it’s mostly stock footage. Sadly, there is no space.

I’m up for a movie about interstellar travel and wormholes. Nolan’s films have been generally pretty grounded so it’ll be interesting to see how things go and what it’s all about.

Here’s hoping that 2014’s science fiction is more thoughtful than 2013’s!

Reflektor is one of the best albums of Arcade Fire’s career. Then again, the same could be said for any of the band’s releases. Exactly how the new double-album stacks up against the rest of the band’s discography is up to the listener to determine. I’m still not sure, but I’m willing to say Reflektor is in the running as their best album. And that’s saying a whole lot.

I was a bit befuddled back in September when the title track was released as a single. Clocking in at 7:30 minutes, the neo-disco tune “Reflektor” is a nice illustration for my experience with the album as a whole.

My first impression was incredulous – even skeptical.

Disco. Really? I don’t hate or even dislike disco, but I really questioned the direction AF was taking with this new single and I worried that it was indicative of the whole album.

Also disconcerting was the news that Reflektor would be a double album. The Suburbs, much as I like it, is pretty long. It’s a bit too long at times and it deters me from listening as often as I might otherwise. How could they have made an even longer album?

Then about a week after the single dropped I gave it another chance. After all, this is Arcade Fire. They’d always been great before. Maybe I just needed to let it sink in.

Yep. I guess that was it.

After that I was hooked. I played the song again. And again. And again. Seven and a half minutes and I listened over and over.

And that was pretty much my experience with the album too. My first listen left me kind of cold and unimpressed. But Reflektor (the album) came alive to me on my second listen. And my third. And forth. Et cetera.

Yes, the album is long, but like the title track, it justifies its length… mostly. Reflektor is the most obviously disco-influenced song, but that vibe permeates a lot of the album most notably “Afterlife.” There are quite a few songs that wouldn’t sound out-of-place on AF’s other releases. “You Already Know” would have been quite at home on The Suburbs and “Here Comes the Night Time” doesn’t sound too far removed from the sounds of Funeral.

But there’s plenty of new ground broken here. For some long time fans that might be a turn off. “Flashbulb Eyes” and “Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)” sound like nothing the band’s ever done before. It’s all really good stuff and amazingly produced. There are a lot more synths and electronic instruments at work here. Really, the overall sound is sort of an extrapolation of “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” from their last record which is great since that was the best song.

The one unfortunate miss for me is the final track “Supersymmetry.” It’s not a bad track, but it’s fairly minimalistic and never comes alive for me like the others. Since it’s the last song on the record it hurts the overall experience more than it might have were it placed elsewhere. Arcade Fire has a history of great finishes. “My Body is a Cage,” “In the Backseat,” “Sprawl II,” and even “Vampire Forest Fire” are among their best songs. It’s a shame they couldn’t stick the landing on this album quite as well.

On the lyrical side of things there’s a lot going on. The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is a major influence especially in the album’s second half. The first disc, on the other hand, seems more dedicated to exploring the affect technology has on people in our “reflective age.”

I can’t pretend to “get” all the songs yet, but I love the fact that there’s more going on under the surface. Certainly one could accuse the band of pretension and I won’t argue against that. If I were not so enraptured by the music, my inner cynic might have dismissed all this Greek myth and modern age commentary as Arcade Fire trying to sound smarter than they really are.

But I like the music. At the end of the day, that’s what matters for me. The album is sonically and thematically cohesive. And the music good. Really good.

Reflektor left me asking myself why I ever doubted Arcade Fire. They’re pretty good at this music thing.